Easter

God created us to reflect Him.

Genesis 1:26-27- Then God said, ‘’Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

That's the account of creation in Genesis 1. Genesis chapter 2 zooms in to give a closer account of the creation of mankind.

Genesis 2:7- The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

All other life, including the animals, was formed by the spoken command of God and created according to its own kind. But here, God Himself gets personally and intimately involved in creation, forming man and breathing the breath of life into his nostrils. This is a differentiation that separates mankind from all of other created life; that we are not created in the mere image of our kind; rather, we are created in the image of the creator.

Psalm 139:13-14- For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

In the same way that God was personally involved with the creation of Adam, he was personally and intimately involved in our creation. We too were created as image bearers of God. And it is very important that, like the Psalmist, we know that full well- because I can’t think of another factor that will define you more than your understanding of your origin and your subsequent identity.

Anyway, in creation, mankind, both man and woman, fully alive, reflected fully, the glory of God, as we were intended to.

Then, we fell.

In the fall, both Adam and Eve, the mother and father of humanity, wilfully disobeyed God in eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the one tree that they were commanded to not eat from. In doing so, through their rebellion, sin entered into the world and it is sin that causes us to not fully reflect God as we should.

Romans 3:23 declares- ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’. In sin, and because of sin, we fall short of the glory of our intended creation and we do mirror God as we should.

Romans 6:23- For the wages of sin is death….

But there is one that has reflected God perfectly. His name is Jesus.

Perhaps the most well known verse of scripture in the world proclaims that the reason for Jesus was that ‘God so loved the world that he gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but would have eternal life’’ In that 'the wages of sin is death' and 'all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God', all of us found ourselves in need of a saviour. And Jesus came to be that saviour. Jesus came because without his intervention, we were on a pathway to perishing and because of His great love for us, He was compelled to come to our aid. This isn’t what we should remember at Easter- this is what we should remember every waking moment of our lives.

Romans 5:6-8- You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

God became flesh and was born.

Jesus.

He lived a life without fault; without sin, so that when he went to the cross, he was completely innocent, not carrying the weight of His own sin, so he could take the weight of our sin upon himself.

Jesus didn’t smile on the cross.

There wasn’t a chocolate bunny or hot cross bun in sight.

The cross was bloody, violent and painful for Jesus.

But the physical pain paled in comparison to the agony of the last moments of his life-as he hung on the cross, the Bible records that he cried out ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’

At that moment, Jesus experienced, for the first time in his life, the separation from God that comes as a result of Sin.

Not long after, He breathed his last breath- but death could not hold him down.

Three days later, Jesus rose from the dead.

If death was sin’s ultimate victory, than the resurrection was the ultimate evidence of the victory won for us by Jesus over Sin.

And now, on account of Him, we, though deserving of death on account of our sin, can live on account of his righteousness.

So what then?

Romans 8:29- For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.

So we, as Christians, are to seek in life, by God’s empowering grace, to become more and more like Jesus. As we become more like Jesus, we reflect God’s image more and more, as we originally were intended to when we were created. Ultimately, this takes place in death.

1 Corinthians 15:49- And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the man from heaven.

What that means is that in sin, we bear the image of Adam. But in Jesus, as we become more and more like Him, we are able to reflect God better and better. And eventually, we will die and we will rise and Jesus died and rose; and we will be restored to our intended state, perfect reflections of God’s image.